Category: while surfing

Do you ever have difficulty explaining to others, let alone your mother, what exactly it is that you do for a living, or what design actually is?
It seems that when I try to explain design, I get hung up somewhere between explaining the process, and giving a laundry list of outcomes (e.g., brochure, logo, web site, etc.).
The conversation usually goes like this:

“What is it that you do?”
“I’m a designer.”
“So what is it that you do?”
“I design logos and brochures and…”
“So what exactly do you do?”
“I create ads and other printed communications.”
“Oh, so you use computers.”
“Yeah… something like that.”

This definition of design seems to have struck a chord with designers, software engineers, and others from around the world:

“Design consists of creating things for clients who may not know what they want, until they see what you’ve done, then they know exactly what they want, but it’s not what you did.”

As designers, we are constantly dealing with ambiguity, focusing and managing expectations, and leading toward an appropriate solution for the problem at hand.

And by the way, you have to do it on a deadline. No problem!

Communicate, don’t decorate.
The sooner you learn to communicate with your designs using only what’s necessary and relevant, rather than decorate for the mere purpose of decorating, the sooner you’ll find your designs touch the consumer’s heart, rather than just satisfy the designer’s eye.

When debugging your CSS, strip down to the base element (div, p, etc) and work up. I’ve found it extremely useful over the course of my career to comment out everything except the element that you think is the cause of the problem. Once I’m positive that element displays properly (or isn’t the problem), I uncomment in the next containing element. Once that element is working properly in tandem with the previous element, I uncomment the next element. And so on. A simple technique, no doubt, but often a useful one.

– Set fonts using ems
Set the font size attribute in the body tag to 62.5 per cent like this:
body { font-size: 62.5% }
This makes one em roughly ten pixels (16 x 62.5% = 10). Now you can equate pixel sizes to ems. For example, type that is set in 12 pixels could be expressed as 1.2em; 9 pixels becomes 0.9em and so on.

– Space saver
Nobody likes building forms in HTML, especially as browsers insist on adding padding around them for no reason. Simply add the following CSS to your stylesheet:

– The correct format for pseudo classes
For text rollover effects, it’s important that the pseudo classes are in the right order, or they won’t work correctly in all browsers. The correct order is:
a:link { color: blue; }
a:visited { color: purple; }
a:hover { color: purple; }
a:active { color: red; }

>> the complete article

Use ‘rel’ and ‘hreflang’ for translations. Links to alternate language versions should use rel=”alternate” and e.g. hreflang=”es” for the Spanish version. The alternate rel value signifies an alternate version of the current page, and hreflang signifies the language of the page at the href (in contrast to the lang attribute which signifies the language of the contents of the element.).

“Use visible data, instead of invisible metadata!!! Use visible hyperlinks!!!”

If in doubt, keep it simple. While some people might like the purple-on-orange combination, it certainly won’t be to everyone’s tastes.
Make sure your site works. I’ve seen plenty of websites that don’t work in my browser of choice (FireFox).
Don’t overdesign your website
The royal “we” Be honest with your clients. If you’re a sole web developer, don’t tell them otherwise
Stock imagery clichés (clouds, fish, sapling metaphors, …)
Dodgy portfoliosA good portfolio needs to consist of as many decent, working, live sites as possible. Quantity is also important in a good portfolio – one or two sites given implies a lack of experience. Any more than 10 examples are probably wasted, but a good number of quality sites will help to increase your visibility. Don’t feel tempted to include lower quality sites in your portfolio just to bulk out the numbers, though – one bad site can cheapen the rest.
Over-use of technical terms

.:: Stuart Brown
Flash intros

qualche tip da Jakob Nielsen per evitare errori nel webdesign:
– evitare file PDF per la lettura online
– utilizzare colori diversi per differenziare i link visitati
– evitare tutto ciò che abbia parvenza di pubblicità (banner, animazioni, pop-up)
– evitare il “target _blank”
– rispondere alle richieste del visitatore (es. inserire i prezzi dei prodotti anche nelle pagine di categoria e nei risultati della ricerca)

una lista interessante dei font che, a parere di Daniel Mall, bisognerebbe spingere definitivamente verso la pensione

“Each time a new technology comes along, new designers make the same horrible mistakes as their predecessors. Technologists are not noted for learning from the errors of the past. They look forward, not behind, so they repeat the same problems over and over again. ”

Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, preface:

Journalism is not writing a novel. The same can be said of design: it is not art.